


the pretty birds have flown (the bird in the hand remix)

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: Thor Works [10]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon character deaths, F/F, F/M, Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-10 10:59:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15947984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “What’s an apocalypse?” Caroline asked, looking up from where she was sharing her pop-tart with the dog.





	the pretty birds have flown (the bird in the hand remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beanarie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Pretty Birds Have Flown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/475717) by [beanarie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie). 



Valkyrie swam back into consciousness because an alarm was chiming somewhere very close to her head. She was wounded, and badly--she could tell that before she’d even opened her eyes. Her face was sticky with blood, and there was a deep, terrible ache in her gut. Darkness was still reaching for her, and it was tempting to sink back into it, to finally take the oblivion she’d wanted since Lyn died at Hela’s hand all those years ago.  
  
But the alarm was still chiming, and there was something almost desperate about the sound, carrying on for so long.  
  
No one else was answering it.  
  
Valkyrie forced her eyes open and painfully turned her head to the side.  
  
A few feet away, her king was collapsed against a pile of rubble, Loki clutched fast in his arms. Loki was very obviously dead, which she had to put entirely out of her mind, swallowing hard against the knowledge.  She couldn’t tell if Thor was dead or merely unconscious, but around his neck, a little pink light was pulsing over and over, and the alarm chimed unhappily from it.

“Majesty,” she rasped, but Thor didn’t stir.  
  
With an awful effort, she managed to press a hand to the wound in her belly, and crawl towards her king, who still didn’t wake.  
  
When she reached him, she pressed a hand first to his throat, felt the faint pulse fluttering there, and jerked in a breath of relief so sharp it was nearly a sob.

“Wake up,” she said, and dropped her hand to the little pink light--an amulet, she saw--hoping to quiet the alarm.  
  
The amulet crackled to life with a glad electric spark, and in the same instant Thor’s eyes flashed open. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, the amulet had seized her up, and wrenched her into space. With utter horror, she saw the generation ship that was Asgard cracking into pieces behind her, Thanos’s ship firing on them one last time. She cried out in grief and rage, and then the Bifrost energy had her, and she was hurtling through the endless fire of space.

She landed hard, and then she did lose consciousness again.  
  
*  
  
When she woke this time, she felt better. Her wounds had been tended, but the rest itself had done her a great deal of good. She sat up, and quickly surveyed her surroundings. She was laid out on a couch in a small, unimpressive looking room, a number of children’s toys scattered on the floor.  
  
Two women were in the room with her, one of them quite small and delicate, the other tall and beautiful. The small woman held Thor’s pink amulet in her hands, worrying the broken chain repetitively, like she’d been doing it for hours.  
  
The tall woman was holding a naked sword to Valkyrie’s throat.  
  
“Who are you?” the swordswoman demanded. “How came you here?”  
  
“I’m the last Valkyrie,” Valkyrie said, and pushed the sword blade away with her thumb. “Who the hell are you?”  
  
“What do you mean, a Valkyrie?” the small woman asked, frowning. “The Valkyrie all died long ago.”  
  
“Nearly,” Valkyrie said, stretching her neck, and winced at the lingering pain in her head. “Does this planet have whiskey?”  
  
The swordswoman was unexpected flushing a little, but she’d brought the blade right back to Valkyrie’s throat. “What master do you serve?” she asked coldly.  
  
Valkyrie’s throat tightened with fresh grief. “Until today I served Asgard, and Thor, my king.”  
  
The sword wavered. “Why until today?” the small woman asked, getting to her feet, clutching the amulet tight in one fist.  
  
“Because Thor is dead,” Valkyrie told them clearly, “and Asgard is no more.”

The swordswoman physically reeled, the swordpoint dropping at last away from Valkyrie’s throat. The small woman went even paler, gripping the back of the armchair for support.  
  
Valkyrie was about to repeat her request for whiskey when a breathless giggle came from the open door, and a harassed-looking dog skidded into the room, swiftly followed by a small yellow-haired child.  
  
“Not right now, Liney,” the small woman said in a choked voice, but the child’s momentum had already carried her too far into the room.  
  
If the sparks that flew when the child happily banged into the metal leg of the coffee table weren’t enough for Valkyrie to put the pieces together, the little pink amulet glowing around the child’s neck, a perfect twin to Thor’s, was more than enough.  
  
“Oh _fuck_ ,” she said.  
  
*  
  
Valkyrie had _joked_ with Heimdall, is the thing, about how lucky they were that Thor wasn’t given to whoring, and therefore wasn’t given to siring bastards. Wasn’t given to taking bed-partners at all, although she’d offered once or twice, and she _knew_ he’d been tempted. But the fragile balance of the ship--and the monarchy, and all that remained of their world--was kept by the fact that the king’s only heir was his newly-reconciled brother.  Heimdall had given her a very ironic look. “Careful stirring that pot,” he’d said dryly, and she thought he’d only been warning her that taking up with the king’s heir rather than the king was as risky an enterprise as any.  
  
But obviously Heimdall saw everything, and so he must have known about Jane Foster, the human witch secreted away on Earth, and he must have known about Sif, once Thor’s dearest friend and now Jane Foster’s personal guard, and he must have known about Caroline, Thor’s daughter, and the future queen of Asgard. Well. Current queen of Asgard. Queen of nothing, really. If she hadn’t glimpsed Heimdall’s broken body on her way to Thor’s fucking exit strategy, she’d consider being angry at them both.  
  
The amulets were a very old magic--something Queen Frigga had crafted long ago to some other purpose, Valkyrie thought--and were meant to summon Caroline’s father to her side whenever Caroline was in immediate danger.  
  
This morning an alien ship had appeared in the sky over her city, turning the street to chaos and several buildings to rubble while Caroline and Foster walked the dog in Central Park, and the magic had reached out for Caroline’s protector. And Valkyrie had grabbed it instead.  
  
Thank god this backwater of a planet _did_ have whiskey, although Foster expressed some distracted disapproval that Valkyrie wanted some at nine-thirty in the morning.  
  
“If you can give me any more information about the gauntlet,” Foster said, in the middle of a slapdash interrogation about the details of Thanos’s ship, whatever speculation the Asgardian war council--all of whom were almost certainly dead except for Valkyrie herself--had come up with about Thanos’s plans.

“There is only one piece of information that matters,” Valkyrie said impatiently for about the hundredth time, while Foster tapped feverishly at a console, where she apparently had detailed maps of the workings of two Infinity stones. Sif was feeding the child something called pop-tart, which looked inedible. “Thanos is coming here. So we have to get off this planet. _Now_ .”  
  
“Earth is protected,” Foster said, for the ninety-ninth time, as though she had any idea what the fuck they were up against. “And I’m not abandoning my home.”  
  
“You’re gonna get that little girl killed,” Valkyrie said flatly, and Sif glared at her.  
  
“Keep a civil tongue in your head when speaking to my lady,” Sif snapped.

Valkyrie gave her the slow smirk she had most recently been assured by the god of lies himself was absolutely infuriating. “Just being honest, lady-knight.” Sif’s cheeks went red, which Valkyrie would have loved to investigate under almost any other circumstance. “Look,” she said seriously. “I get that you wanted to grow up and be me, yeah? I know you’re brave, and honorable, and you think you’re dangerous. But I’m telling you. _It’s not enough._ ”  
  
“All due respect,” Foster said, not looking up from her console, “But we’ve stopped the apocalypse a few times now. We know what we’re doing.”  
  
“What’s an apocalypse?” Caroline asked, looking up from where she was sharing her pop-tart with the dog.  
  
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Foster said firmly, and Caroline shrugged, appearing to accept this.  
  
Valkyrie lowered her voice. “Thor couldn’t stop him,” she said, ticking off on her fingers. “Loki couldn’t stop him. The All-Seeing couldn’t. The _Hulk_ couldn’t stop him, and _I_ couldn’t stop him. You think you have a chance, you’re crazy.”  
  
“Of course we don’t have a chance,” Foster said, pouring herself an aggrieved cup of coffee. Her hands were trembling, and her voice was a little high-pitched, but she was firm in her purpose. “We don’t have a plan. Yet. Now please, if you could just--answer the question, Val--wait, your name isn’t really Valkyrie, is it? That’s like, your job, right?”  
  
“Right,” Sif confirmed, raising a single black eyebrow at Valkyrie. “What _is_ your name?”  
  
“Don’t remember,” Valkyrie claimed insincerely, mostly for the pleasure of seeing Sif’s eye twitch. Really no one had said her name out loud since Hela murdered her sisters, and it was fine with her if no one did again--but she didn’t owe either of these women that kind of explanation.  
  
“Fine,” Foster said, finally sounding annoyed. “Hey, you. The gauntlet. As many adjectives as you can give me, please.”  
  
Valkyrie sighed. “I’m gonna need another drink,” she warned Sif, and finished the bottle.

*

Jane Foster, it turned out, had a mind like a razor-sharp kaleidoscope. She grilled Valkyrie for a few more hours, then summoned up an image of a fellow witch on the other side of the world to discuss the information with, after repeatedly expressing frustration that Stark and Strange had fucked off right when they might come in useful. She was so ferociously busy that she could have looked unmoved by Thor’s death, except that she’d wrapped the amulet around her wrist like a bracelet, and she touched it constantly, and sometimes when she did so, her breath gave a sharp involuntary hitch. Foster’s mother came by to take the Last Queen of Asgard to ballet, and Valkyrie found herself dismissed.  
  
She left the apartment and went outside, staring up at the alien sky. It was a nice sky--blue and calm. It was a nice street, if crowded with buildings and people, right by a little green park. It wasn’t anything like Asgard-that-was, but it was loads better than Sakaar. She thought she saw why Thor had wanted to bring them here, secret woman and bastard child aside. She threw the empty bottle at the pointless iron post rising up out of the ground, abruptly furious at him--her king who’d hidden all this from her, who’d been _alive_ when she’d seen him last and was undoubtedly dead now--because he’d hidden all this from her, and she hadn’t known she was stealing his lifeboat. She stalked off down the street, her throat burning with grief.  
  
It only took her fifteen minutes to find a bar.

She was six boilermakers deep and only mildly drunk--Earth liquor was proving sadly watered-down--when Sif sat down at the bar beside her.  
  
“You were there when my king died,” Sif said, halting, and Valkyrie remembered that brief flash of Thor’s open eyes, Loki’s cold corpse. If she’d known about the amulet, she could have sent him to Earth instead, and now he was drifting alone in the dark of space.  
  
“I’m not doing this while you’re sober,” Valkyrie said harshly, and ordered another round for both of them.  
  
Sif sighed and pushed a little plastic card across the bar, which Valkyrie noted with numb approval. She’d been assuming she’d have to fight her way out of paying the tab.

“I love Thor more than anything,” Sif said after the first ale. Her cheeks were violently red again. “I’d have died for him on a hundred battlefields. I never thought I’d outlive him by so much as an hour.”  
  
“Most of Asgard died at his side,” Valkyrie said, and shuddered. “I don’t think he’d begrudge you the rest of your life.”  
  
“But I was his right hand, once,” Sif said, and turned to her, eyes red. “I wanted to be with him until the end. Instead I was here,” she said bitterly, and gestured at the planet around them. “Safe as a child.”  
  
“Safe as _his_ child,” Valkyrie said, and met Sif’s gaze steadily until she gave a short, miserable nod, acknowledging the point. “Drink,” she ordered, and they both drank.  
  
“Listen,” Valkyrie said, the room finally starting to swim pleasantly around her. “Listen, girl.”  
  
“‘M not a girl,” Sif protested, which was laughable--she was at least a hundred years younger than Thor, and Valkyrie had grown up and seen her sisters and the love of her life slaughtered before Odin the king had put aside his first wife.

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Sif said, scowling, which let Valkyrie know she’d said most of that aloud. “I’ve killed my share of foes, and I’ve loved full well, and I’ve lost just as many people as you have.”  
  
“Fine,” Valkyrie said, rolling her eyes. “You’re a woman grown. Listen to me, woman.”  
  
“I’m listening, Last Valkyrie,” Sif said. Her mouth twisted. “That name means less when Asgard itself is gone.”  
  
“We’re not the last Asgardians,” Valkyrie said forcefully. “Korg took the kids.”  
  
“Who’s Korg?”  
  
“Pile of rocks,” Valkyrie said. “Nice guy.” She waved Sif’s concerned look away. “The point is, there’s ten escape pods full of kids and old women that we sent away as soon as it became clear we were being pursued.”  
  
Sif’s breath audibly caught in her chest.  
  
“And you and I,” Valkyrie continued, close and fierce, “May be the last living adult Asgardians in the goddamn quadrant. And we’re here with _the king’s daughter_ and _his secret lover_ , and she wants to use children’s magic and the flimsy strength of human heroes to stop a monster I am telling you they cannot stop.”  
  
“You don’t know that,” Sif said, but Valkyrie could tell she was wavering.  
  
“You’re right,” Valkyrie said. “I don’t know that. Here’s what I know.” She gripped Sif’s shoulders for emphasis, and Sif automatically steadied herself by grabbing hold of Valkyrie’s elbows. “Somewhere all that remains of Asgard is drifting alone in space. The king’s daughter is here, and _here is where Thanos’s lieutenants are coming_. I think our job is pretty damn clear.”

Sif’s hands tightened on her arms. Her thumbs were warm on Valkyrie’s skin. “I won’t disobey Lady Jane,” she said. “But I’ll talk to her.”  
  
“All right, then,” Valkyrie said, and gave her a brief, savage smile. She offered her last glass, and waited for Sif to do the same. “To Asgard.”  
  
“To Asgard,” Sif said, her voice choked.

*

Foster wasn’t nearly so tractable.  
  
“I don’t just have spaceships lying around!” Foster protested. The circles under her eyes were so dark they were nearly purple, even though it hadn’t yet been a full day. “Even if I did agree to just leave, we can’t _just leave_.”  
  
“Who’s got ‘em, then?” Valkyrie wanted to know. “Bet Sif and I can steal something.”  
  
“SHIELD does,” Sif said, and Foster cast her an exasperated look.  
  
“SHIELD doesn’t exist anymore,” Foster said.  
  
“Technically.” Sif crossed her arms over her chest.

“....does anybody _else_ have spaceships around here?” Valkyrie asked, raising her eyebrows.  
  
“Wakanda,” Foster said, and gestured at the device which had let her talk to the far-off witch earlier in the day.  “And more importantly, Wakanda has Princess Shuri.” She rubbed her temples. “I think--if we’re going anywhere, we’re going there.”  
  
Valkyrie wasn’t gonna argue with “getting closer to the spaceships”, although Sif tried, for reasons she didn’t fully understand.  
  
In less than six hours, the three of them and Caroline--who Foster and Sif both indulged by calling either “Comet” or “Liney”--were seated on a jet headed to Wakanda. Foster spent almost the whole time on the phone, working on her console, and Sif, to Valkyrie’s surprise, had a series of conversations on her own phone, although they tended less towards seidr and more towards practicalities (“Give me command of two hundred spears,” Sif said at one point, “And I can keep the northern wall by myself.”)

Valkyrie was left with the child for company. Caroline regarded her solemnly.  
  
“How old are you?” Caroline asked, after a very long silence.  
  
“Two thousand and three,” Valkyrie said, although she didn’t honestly know if that was accurate. You lost track after a while. “How old are you?”  
  
“Four,” Caroline said, and Valkyrie blinked. She’d have guessed at least eighty.  
  
“That is,” Valkyrie fumbled for something diplomatic. It had been a while since she’d been called upon to speak to a child this small.  “Very little.”

“I’ve never been to Wakanda before, but I like cats,” Caroline said, apparently out of nowhere. “Do you like cats?”  
  
“What’s a cat?”  
  
Caroline giggled.  
  
“No, really,” Valkyrie said, which also proved amusing.  
  
“My dad likes cats,” Caroline said, which gave Valkyrie a little jolt. The girl didn’t remind her of Thor at all, really. She seemed like any happy child, confident that those around her loved her and could protect her from any harm. 

“When’s the last time you saw your dad?” Valkyrie asked carefully.  
  
Caroline shrugged, which Valkyrie assumed meant “not recently”.  
  
“He was a good king,” Valkyrie said, not at all sure what you were supposed to say to a child whose father had died that morning. She must have been told, but did she understand, really, what death meant? She didn’t seem like the sort of child who had seen a dead body, who knew what it meant to leave and never return. She glanced up at Foster, talking rapidly into her console. Foster clearly loved her child, but also clearly preoccupied with saving her world. “And he was a good man, your dad.”

Caroline got out a toy spaceship from her bag and crashed it into Valkyrie’s knee, which more or less ended the conversation. 

  
*  
  
Wakanda was the first place Valkyrie had seen on Earth that convinced her this was a civilized place, after all. Foster was closeted at once with Princess Shuri, who was some kind of child-genius, and Caroline was taken into the palace nursery by a very capable-looking woman who might have been the queen mother. The king--a slight, grave man--took Valkyrie and Sif aside after everyone else had disappeared.

“You’ve fought this thing that wants us dead,” he said to her, and she nodded. “Show me how.”

Oh thank fuck, she’d get to hit something. Sif looked similarly relieved.  “Yeah, all right,” she said, and let him lead them to a practice room, where she showed them both how.  
  
King T’Challa, although human, was a force to be reckoned with in his strange armor--she saw what Caroline meant now, about the animals--and the general who joined them was nearly as good as he was. Sif, though--Sif was _magnificent_. Under any other circumstance, Valkyrie could have lost herself in the sheer physical delight of fighting someone who could match her.  
  
But these were not other circumstances. She showed them the full force of her strength, made sure they all recognized it for what it was, and then she described exactly how she had been taken apart by Thanos’s lieutenants, and shown them the things she’d tried, how none of it had worked. She ended by describing the last thing she’d seen before losing consciousness--Thanos himself subduing the Hulk in less than ten seconds. They all of them left the practice room sobered and serious.  
  
That night she found herself in a beautiful room adjoining Foster’s. The window opened up into a balcony overlooking a perfectly beautiful night in a beautiful city.  
  
She remembered the things Loki told their war council about Thanos before his ship caught up with them, and again her mind returned her to that last awful glimpse of the bridge. His body in Thor’s arms. The preparations Wakanda made today--that she had been told Earth’s mightiest heroes made elsewhere--they were plans to prevent Asgard’s tragedy from happening to them, not to salvage what yet remained of Asgard in the stars. It occurred to her that she hadn’t felt this _Asgardian_ in almost a thousand years.  
  
Caroline started crying in the other room, an exhausted child’s wail, the sound drifting in from the balcony. She could hear Foster speaking softly to her, although not the words themselves, and then there was another, softer sob, and she knew Foster wept, too.  
  
She abruptly got up and left her room, closing the door gently behind herself.  
  
Sif opened the door at the first knock, although she was clearly dressed for sleep, her lovely thick hair hanging loose over her shoulders. “We’re not stealing a spacecraft,” Sif said immediately, like she’d been expecting Valkyrie. “My lady believes she can help Princess Shuri destroy an infinity stone and prevent Thanos from finishing his foul work--my duty to her and to all the peoples of the universe is greater even than my duty to Asgard.”  
  
Valkyrie rolled her eyes. “I know.”  
  
“Then--why are you here?”  
  
Valkyrie shrugged. “Didn’t feel like being the only Asgardian in the room. Do you have any liquor in here?”  
  
Sif let her in, and she let Valkyrie raid the cabinets behind her until she found something that resembled alcohol, and then she cautiously curled up at the end of her bed with Valkyrie, drinking Wakandan liquor out of tiny porcelain cups.

“The Avengers are coming here tomorrow,” Sif said after a while. “Thanos will come after that.”  
  
So tomorrow we die, Valkyrie thought, but didn’t say. Sif seemed to understand her anyway.  
  
“There’s a--selfish part of me that’s comforted,” Sif admitted. “If we die in the same fight, it will be like I didn’t fail my king after all.” She grimaced. “But the larger part of me wants to cut off the bastard’s head, and offer it to Caroline on a silver platter.”

  
“We’ll give it our best fucking shot,” Valkyrie promised her, and thought: dying with a sister at arms is better than the death I thought I’d get, anyway.  
  
Sif kissed her first, as if she understood that, too.  
  
*  
  
They _were_ extremely well matched.  
  
*  
  
Valkyrie’s first shock of the day came when the Avengers arrived and brought _Banner_ with them.  
  
“Hey, big girl!” he called out to her, grinning, and she left Sif with Okoye so she could embrace him.  
  
“Hey big boy,” she said, and clapped him on the shoulder. He stumbled a little--weaker than she remembered him. “How the fuck did you get here?”  
  
“Last piece of Bifrost energy Heimdall could spare,” he said. “You?”  
  
“Enchanted amulet supposed to rescue Thor, caught me by mistake,” she said. “Did you know Thor has a daughter?”  
  
“No shit?” Banner said, his eyes wide. “Like, _here_?”  
  
“In the palace,” she said, gesturing vaguely behind them.  
  
“I meant on Earth,” he said, still looking shocked. “Oh, wait, this is the girlfriend who dumped him? The astrophysicist? _Dr. Jane Foster_ is his baby-mama?”  
  
“Guess so,” Valkyrie said, although she wasn’t at all sure that Thor and Foster were parted. Thor never took lovers, and Foster most certainly mourned for him.  
  
“Wow,” he said. “That’s...wow. That’s gotta be….quite a kid.”  
  
Valkyrie shrugged. Caroline seemed perfectly ordinary to her.  
  
She was disappointed to find that she wouldn’t be fighting alongside the Hulk, although she didn’t quite believe Banner when he said the Hulk wouldn’t come out to play, no matter how grave the danger.  
  
Foster and Princess Shuri were sharing the work of removing and destroying the infinity stone embedded in the skull of the man called Vision, as well as something else that Valkyrie didn’t pretend to understand, about accessing the energy resonating between the stones. She left them to it, and put herself at Okoye’s disposal.  
  
So when Thanos’s army came, she was at Sif’s side, and she stayed at Sif’s side throughout the fighting, and so she heard the sound Sif made when a bolt of lightning broke into the fury of the battlefield, and Thor emerged from the crash with the sound of thunder, two strange companions with him and a wicked-looking axe in his hands.  
  
“THOR,” Sif cried out, just as Valkyrie shouted “ _Majesty_ ,” and Thor looked over at them, his dark expression giving way to an enormous, exultant smile.  
  
“My friends, you fill me with joy,” he called out to them, and killed five enemies making his way to their side. “Comet?” he asked Sif urgently, when he was close enough.  
  
“Safe,” Sif promised him, and decapitated the soldier Valkyrie had primed for her. “The Lady Jane as well.”  
  
“Thank god,” Thor said, his voice cracking a little, and Valkyrie threw a javelin over his shoulder, stopping the soldier that had been about to stick a knife in his neck point-first.  
  
Thor smiled his thanks at her, and she and Sif both fell into comfortable positions fighting at his side. They both had practice at occupying the place, she realized with amusement.  
  
“Glad you’re safe,” Thor said to her, panting as he swung.  
  
“How the hell are you alive?” she asked, ducking the arc of the battle-axe.  
  
“Long story,” he said. “I did get this axe at the end of it.”  
  
“It’s a mighty weapon,” Sif said, and used Thor’s arm to launch herself into the air.  
  
“It’s a god-killing weapon,” Thor said to Valkyrie, still at his side. He grinned savagely at her, and for the first time since she opened her eyes the day before, Valkyrie felt something like hope that they might win the day.  
  
*  
  
But of course they did not.  
  
*  
  
When the battle was lost, and the dust settled, Valkyrie reached blindly for Sif, clutching her forearm tightly enough to bruise. Sif held on equally hard, barely restrained panic on her face. They stayed like that as they accounted for the living. There was no accounting for the dead. Horrified, confused grief was everywhere on the field, as were the endless, sickening drifts of ash.  
  
Thor lived, although he went white as a Jotunar plain when he learned that Jane and Caroline were _here in Wakanda,_  and quite literally couldn’t speak until they led him to the palace.  
  
The room where Foster and Shuri were meant to be working was smashed almost to pieces, and contained the bodies of two enemy soldiers.  
  
“No dust,” Valkyrie said hoarsely. She still hadn’t let go of Sif’s arm.  
  
Thor nodded, a very tiny jerk of his head. His eyes were red.  
  
“Come,” Sif said, and lead them to the nursery, where there were was more chaos, more dust and more weeping, plenty of parents having come already to find their children, plenty of them finding no one. There were adults taking care of the children, but they were as panicked and lost as the children themselves.  Valkyrie was sick just looking at it.  
  
Caroline was not there.  
  
Thor was trembling. She could see it from here.  
  
“Our rooms,” Sif said desperately. “Caroline could have been--jet lag, she might have been tired, or--” Or it was somewhere for Thor to be that was not here, in the middle of other people’s grief.  
  
Between the two of them, they led Thor back to Foster’s rooms. The doors were flung open, and there was the sound of someone saying something over and over.  
  
Valkyrie’s heart pounded hard in her chest, and she tightened her grip on Sif.  
  
In a corner of the bedroom, Jane Foster was on her knees, clutching Caroline tightly to her chest. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” Foster was saying, face buried in her daughter’s shoulder.  
  
Caroline saw her father first. “ _Dad_ ,” she said, and Foster flinched.  
  
Thor made a small wounded sound, and was across the room in two strides, and then he had them in his arms.  
  
“Oh--oh my god,” Foster said unevenly, and burst into tears.  
  
We’re all here, Valkyrie thought through the fog of fear and shock. Every Asgardian on this planet. We all lived.  
  
It was nothing, in the face of everything lost--it was less than nothing, it was infuriating in the face of so much evil. _Evil that would be undone,_  while there was life left in her body. But here--in this room--they lived, and her heart raced with the knowledge. After a while Jane reached out for Sif, and Sif wouldn’t let go of her, which was all right because Thor caught Valkyrie up with his free arm, and for the first time in days she could almost breathe.  
  
This was her _king_ , she thought helplessly, her queen, her shield-sister, and Asgard’s future. This was her whole world in one room.

They'd lost every battle, but Korg still had the children, somewhere out there, and against all fucking odds she still had a world.

Valkyrie closed her eyes and wept with relief.

 

**Author's Note:**

> It was so much fun to play with this idea (I love secret babies!), and to give me an excuse to put some of the Forgotten Ladies of Marvel together into a story (seriously, where the hell are Sif and Jane? where the hell was Val in Infinity War?) and let them figure themselves out.
> 
> I know the timeline in here is wobbly, but in fairness, it's wobbly in Infinity War, too. I hope you enjoy it regardless!


End file.
